Josh Marshall
From TPM Reader EF …
I have been very heartened by Biden. The legislative success of the stimulus, the competence shown with the vaccine rollout, and the upcoming stimulus bill point to the possibility of people rediscovering that government can make a difference in their lives.
There are a host of articles today about the US reaching a vaccination tipping point at which the key challenge is no longer the supply of vaccine but the supply of people willing to take it. Like “herd immunity” it isn’t a binary, clear-cut moment. It’s incremental. We’re approaching it now and the challenge will accelerate over the next two to four weeks. In many ways this challenge is a product of our success. In January I don’t think anyone thought we’d have widespread availability and half of all adults vaccinated in April. But we did it.
I’m working my way through your emails on making sense of the post-Trump Era. Please keep them coming. (See the linked post for more details.) They are fascinating but like the topic itself they are hard to bring into focus. There are common themes but they are elusive. I will be publishing a number of them. But I wanted to start with this note from TPM Reader CC, who lives in Australia. It’s a very different perspective given that’s from someone in a foreign country on the other side of the world. But I found it very interesting as a window into what America now looks like from abroad …
A very interesting backgrounder from TPM Reader AH on the specifics of the kind of stroke that killed Brian Sicknick …
Hi, Josh! This is a topic I really do know something about – I am consulted to see several patients for stroke every day. The news about Brian Sicknick having died from a brainstem stroke is a bit of a surprise to me, because they are uncommon in general, and for a young, healthy guy to have one raises my eyebrows. To die from one is less surprising – these are the most, or maybe tied for the most lethal strokes you could possibly have.
What To Make of the Death of Brian Sicknick?
What are we to make of yesterday’s news that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died of ‘natural causes’? Sicknick’s death and to a much lesser degree the suicides of two other Capitol Police Officers within days of the insurrection are inextricably bound up in the story of that day and the gravity of those events. The Medical Examiner’s comments to the Post were themselves contradictory, at least in layman’s terms. Francisco J. Diaz found no discrete injury such as a head wound that would have been a proximate cause of Sicknick’s strokes. He also found no sign of acute respiratory constriction, which would be the standard sign of an allergic reaction to chemical spray which also could have caused a subsequent stroke. Yet Diaz also said of the events of January 6th and Sicknick’s confrontation with insurrectionists that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”
What does that mean?
You see the question. Tell me what you’re thinking, what sense you’re making of the post-Trump Era. How does it feel? Withdrawal? Relief? Confusion? Perhaps as important as anything what do you expect? Over the next year and the next four?
I’ve written in a few posts about what I’ve called the Politics of Opaqueness, how much the direction of events is now seemingly driven by decisions, developments, fortuitous and otherwise, that are outside of our view. Even more than this though, I think most people – myself included – thought we had a pretty clear view into what a post-Trump presidency would be like. Trump leaving doesn’t mean the end of Trumpism, he’ll continue to dominate the scene from the outside. In the event, I don’t think much of that has turned out to be true.
What are you seeing? Drop me your notes at the main email address.
Today is the first day that everyone in the United States 16 and over is eligible to be vaccinated. 25.4% of the US population is now fully vaccinated. But look a bit deeper and you see that as of this morning 50.4% of Americans 18 and over have now received at least one shot. 32.5% are fully vaccinated. Given the interval of 3 or 4 weeks between injections, we can figure that by mid-May around 50% of all adults will have been vaccinated.
Extremism in US Special Forces
I wanted to flag your attention to this NBC article about radicalization among current and retired US Special Forces personnel. NBC got access to private Facebook groups for these communities – again current and former. They had a lot of racist, far-right, QAnon type content. Not universal and not uncontested, but still a lot.
Why Now on Manafort and Kilimnik?
I want to recommend you read Josh Kovensky’s write up of yesterday’s Treasury Department statement about the 2016 Trump campaign’s direct tie to Russian intelligence. The Mueller report and the later Senate intelligence report were both unwilling or unable to determine whether Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik had passed the campaign information he received from Manafort to Russian intelligence. Treasury said he did. This is not a huge surprise since Kilimnik is widely reputed to be a Russian spy. And we should note that these are assertions listed in what amounts to a bill of particulars. They don’t explain what evidence underlies these claims. But this is the first time the US government has connected the pieces so clearly and categorically.
Why now?
The Uncanny Political Moment
There’s a sizable batch of new polling out which shows that President Biden’s infrastructure plan is popular with a broad cross-section of the public. The popularity isn’t quite as overwhelming as it was for the American Rescue Plan. But by almost every standard in a polarized age the numbers are still overwhelming. A new poll sponsored by the Times shows 64% support. Democrats almost unanimously support it (97%). 72% of Independents support it. And even 29% of Republicans support it. The support is spread broadly across demographic groups and the individual components of the plan poll well too.